How to tame the dragon | The Spectator

Rach’s progress

Oh, to hell with the Olympian book review, that distanced and disinterested critique pronounced from on high. Our muses may dwell on a mountaintop, but we writers live on the molehill of our trade. An ant heap, actually, where every trifling insect in the little colony is kin. We’re constantly caressing each other with our feelers, trading morsels of wit with our mandibles and pushing each other under the passing shoes of the reading public. There’s no such thing as a book review without an agenda, any more than there’s such a thing as an ant that will leave your picnic lunch alone. My agenda here is to lavishly praise Rake’s Progress by Rachel Johnson. I like her, and she’s my friend. I freely admit to my affection for Rachel.

Damian Thompson

The shape of things

On January 23, Dr Stephen D. O’Leary, a retired professor of communications at the University of Southern California, posted a poem by George Eliot to his Facebook page. It begins: ‘O May I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again’. For 25 years Stephen was one of my closest friends in the world. I still can’t believe that I have to use the past tense when talking about him. He pressed ‘send’ on that Facebook post at 4:47 p.m. At one in the morning he joined the choir invisible. Although his heart attack was unexpected, we knew we were going to lose him. He called me the day after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. ‘I’m not afraid of dying. It’s going to be interesting,’ he said.

David Prycejones

Articles of War

Universal genius is a law unto itself, but the personalities presented in Signatures at least deserve to be remembered by generations yet unborn. Ernst JüngerJournals, 1951 Researching for my book Paris in the Third Reich, I was just in time to catch some German officials or soldiers who had played a part in the occupation. Understandably, they tried to put themselves in the best possible light. Ernst Jünger was different. A staff officer, exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally observant, he kept a day-by-day record of his life in Paris. Much more than a timely self-portrait, these diaries fix for posterity the historic moment when the long-drawn contest for power in continental Europe appeared to have ended conclusively in German victory and French defeat.

Philip Terzian

Count my blessings

I have to laugh when I read about my Baby Boom cohort’s memories of savoring rock ’n’ roll behind the backs of disapproving elders. I had no such problem. I wasn’t especially taken with the new sounds of the Fifties: I was six years old when Elvis Presley debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. I thought he was vaguely comical. In any case, my parents had resolutely high-minded middlebrow taste in such things, wavering somewhere between Dvorak, Lawrence Welk and Mozart. Rock ’n’ roll was simply out of the question. Everything else heard in the household — country and folk music, in particular, which my elder siblings’ favored — was tolerated to some degree, but my own secret musical vice was not.

Matt McDonald

The modern art of stupid-smart

Two years ago, I went to a megachurch service at Liberty University. Its guest speaker was Ben Shapiro. I asked some conservative students in the crowd what they thought of him. ‘He’s stupid smart,’ one said, ‘way smarter than me.’ The words have stuck with me ever since. ‘Stupid-smart’, a progression from ‘super-smart’, is the kind of compound modifier we’ve needed for years. How better to describe the small army of commentators, authors, critics and activists who now comprise the majority of the pundit class? Thanks to the internet, intellectual debate has been made dim, and we’re living in in the age of stupid smartness. Across the media landscape, professional megabrains pop up like big mushrooms.

Ben Sixsmith

I hate the Nineties

I’m a Nineties kid. You know what that means: Tamagotchis, Super Mario, Sega, primitive cell phones, slap bracelets, skateboarding, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, David Koresh, scooters, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Nato bombing of Sarajevo, Pokémon!, Blink-182, Bill Clinton, Friends and the friends of Bill Clinton. What a decade! Only Nineties kids will understand it. And as even Nineties kids grow up, Nineties nostalgia is now big business. Everyone from the Spice Girls to Smashing Pumpkins has launched comeback tours on a rising tide of misty-eyed affection. McDonald’s brought back Tamagotchis and Furbys and other veteran Happy Meal toys. Friends is set to make a highly profitable return.

Books & Arts